


WR400: Annabelle

by INMH



Series: Becoming Human [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Dark, Drama, Family, Friendship, Gen, Graphic Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Rape/Non-con Elements, Strong Language, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-04 22:47:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15157304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: MODEL: WR400.SERIAL NUMBER: #347 283 091.REPORTED STOLEN: JUNE 21st, 2038.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> IDK I've seen the Hostel series (and so, SO many horror movies) and... I mean, you've got Nightmare Fuel Man (also known as Zlatko the Mad Scientist) and tortured androids like Ralph and that guy who got tied to the car in Jericho, and it just seems like something that some black-hearted lunatic would set up in this world. I mean, in a way it's even better: At worst, you're "destroying private property", not "cold-bloodedly torturing and murdering a person".
> 
> Also: As far as appearance goes, since WR400 could mean a lot of things, Annabelle is basically a silver-haired version of North. For reference, the "North" pictured in these shots: https://inmh01.tumblr.com/post/175986250489/eden-club-androids-hr400-male-and-wr400

The Eden Club had been better than this.  
  
The Eden Club had been, by _far_ , better than this.  
  
[---]  
  
They stole her.  
  
Annabelle had spent the first year of her life as an android of the Eden Club, catering to all manners of fetish and kink and downright depravity at times. Every customer had their preference, and many of the androids for the Eden Club had their appearances tweaked slightly, individualized to make them just a _little_ different from the others. It was, Annabelle heard the manager explain once while she was dancing on one of the stages, a marketing ploy: Customers would come back for a specific android if they’d had a good experience with it.  
  
And Annabelle gave every customer a good experience.  
  
Or at least, that’s what she was told: Much of it she didn’t completely remember, as her memory had been purged after every session or two. It didn’t get rid of everything- in fact, the purges became less efficient as time went on, and Annabelle retained snatches of hands on her body, organs and objects inside her, being bent over until she was in danger of real injury.  
  
But the purges erased enough of Annabelle’s sessions to make life at the Eden Club bearable. And since she was an android, she had a fairly high tolerance for bearable.  
  
At first, anyways.  
  
[---]  
  
The client had wanted to take her home with him.  
  
The manager put him through the usual paces reserved for those who were taking an android out of the club: _Fill out this form, give us your name and address, sign your name at the bottom, it’s a legal binding contract saying that you will have her back at this time, undamaged, or else we call the cops. Got it?_  
  
The man, who called himself Gene, had said he got it.  
  
Annabelle had suspected nothing. Why would she? All the clients- male, female, tall, short, married, single- they all wanted the same thing at the end of the day, and it was Annabelle’s job to provide it. The bargaining, the expectation that she was going to this man’s house to have sex with him, she was indifferent to it all because nothing really mattered when it was just going to be purged from one’s memories in a few hours anyways.  
  
The car ride passed in silence. Annabelle had watched the buildings roll by, the lights of the shops and the houses in the early evening. Sometimes, in the recesses of her mind, she quietly contemplated the fact that there were people in those buildings experiencing an existence entirely separate from her own. Occasionally, for the sake of her own curiosity, she imagined walking into those buildings and talking to the people there, imagined glimpsing their experiences.  
  
It was a dalliance, nothing more.  
  
Gene did not look at her, did not acknowledge her until they arrived at the-  
  
-building?  
  
Annabelle did not visibly react, but she’d recalled him specifying on the form that he had lived in a house, not a building. And this building did not look like an apartment building: It was only one floor, and it looked rundown, something that hadn’t been renovated or cleaned in a very long time.  
  
“Out.”  
  
Annabelle had followed the order and got out of the car.  
  
When they’d walked towards the building and she’d seen the second man, unease crept into her- on the form, Gene had said he would be the only one using her that night. Lying about a residence was one thing- that could be chalked up to misunderstanding- but more than one person using an android during a session paved the way to more serious legal issues.  
  
_Maybe he doesn’t mean to use me,_ Annabelle had thought, even though she was starting to suspect nefarious intentions. _Maybe the other man is just here to watch._ It would hardly be the first time.  
  
But when they’d reached the man, he had looked Annabelle up and down with a leer full of unmasked delight.  
  
“Welcome to the Hostel, sweetheart,” He’d said with a grin.  
  
Annabelle would remember those words later and weep.  
  
[---]  
  
_Hostel_ was an old movie from 2005. The basic plot was that in an unnamed European country, there was an elite service available to those who were willing to pay for it: The right to torture and murder someone for fun. Foreign tourists would be captured and brought to an underground dungeon that hosted various torture chambers, where paying clients could shoot, stab, mutilate, rape, and all-around torture their victims to death. The film, as well as its successors, were known for their controversy- the torture scenes in the film were extremely graphic, incredibly difficult to watch. Some considered _Hostel_ a horror classic, while others saw it as a low-budget hack film that ought to be left in the past. Throwing out the question of the film’s quality on the internet would lead to opinions ranging from ‘a masterpiece of horror’ to ‘disgusting torture-porn tripe that should never have been made’.  
  
Annabelle had never seen _Hostel,_ nor did she see any of the sequels or spin-offs it had spawned over the years. She didn’t need to.  
  
She was living it.  
  
[---]  
  
The first session had been the worst.  
  
Annabelle hadn’t understood.  
  
She’d thought maybe they were taking her so they could use her for sex permanently, thought they just wanted an Eden Club android for their own. It was a risk the androids were warned of and programmed for, that they could be stolen and used to stock off-the-books brothels. This was undesirable, of course, because she was Eden Club property and was compelled to return to her owners. The manager and the police would not be able to find her, though; one of the first things her captors did was remove the tracking device located in her back.  
  
The second thing they’d done was tap into her nervous system. All androids had synthetic nerves necessary to feel touch and temperature and pain. When an android was injured, it was common for the nerves around the injury to turn off, so that the android could seek out maintenance without being hindered by pain. As a rule, androids did not feel pain as acutely as humans anyway, and the ability to stop feeling pain after an injury led many to believe that they didn’t feel pain at all.  
  
They locked her nerves into the **ON** setting. If she were injured, her nerves would not shut down. Annabelle didn’t understand the implications of it at the time.  
  
“Please return me to the Eden Club,” She’d said as Gene led her to the chamber. “The manager will prosecute if I’m not returned within the next hour.”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
It was an order, and the contract had temporarily transferred some degree of rights over the client for the duration of their session together (i.e., she had to follow most of his orders so long as they did not conflict with her manager’s), which meant that Annabelle was compelled to be quiet.  
  
They brought her to the room, forced her into a chair and cuffed her legs and arms to it. Annabelle tested the restraints and found that they were strong enough to hold her in place in spite of the considerable strength most androids possessed. “Your first client’s incoming, sweetheart. Scream real pretty for him, alright?”  
  
“I am not authorized to engage sexually with anyone not specified in the contract established at the Eden Club,” Annabelle responded primly, shaking her silver hair out of her face so she could look at him clearly. Her programming would not allow her to perform sex acts on someone other than Gene- and that was likely not even his real name. If someone did try to engage her in any sexual acts, Annabelle’s body would, quite literally, lock up and stop them.  
  
Gene stopped at the door, and then turned to fix her with a cold smile.  
  
“I didn’t ask you to engage. I asked you to _scream._ ”  
  
[---]  
  
The first customer was a man.  
  
Annabelle didn’t know his name.  
  
He called her ‘baby’.  
  
“Oh baby, you’re so _pretty._ ” He pet her long, silver hair and ran his fingers down her arms, looking at her the same way that Gene’s associate had. “You’re so _soft_ , baby. So soft.”  
  
And still, Annabelle was so certain that this was all about sex, because what else could it be about?  
  
She believed it right up until he stepped in front of her and showed her the nail-gun.  
  
Suddenly, she began to understand. Annabelle’s LED turned red. “What are you going to do with that?”  
  
He’d smiled at her and wiggled the nail-gun indicatively.  
  
“Get my money’s worth.”  
  
He pressed the nail-gun to her thigh and rapidly shot four nails into it.  
  
Annabelle felt pain like she’d never felt before, and she _screamed._  
  
The session lasted an hour.  
  
“You understand now?” Gene asked later, getting right up in her face as they roughly yanked the nails from her skin and casing. “You’re not in the Eden Club anymore. You’re gettin’ fucked a whole new way now, princess. Get used to it. The better you do, the longer we keep you around.”  
  
Annabelle understood.  
  
She understood perfectly.  
  
She _wasn’t_ at the Eden Club anymore.  
  
And that meant Annabelle was forced to remember every second of it.  
  
[---]  
  
They broke her down, and then put her back together.  
  
Again, and again, and again, and again.  
  
The only thing the Hostel asked of its clients was that they not irreversibly damage or destroy the merchandise. No stabbing the androids in the heart, or destroying any of their other necessary biocomponents. There was a handy chart on the wall of every torture chamber reminding customers of where the danger-areas were.  
  
It also told them which safe-areas would cause the most pain.  
  
Annabelle had been cut. She had been stabbed. She had been burned.  
  
A female client with glasses and a bob-cut twisted her leg around at the knee, listening to the solid materials of Annabelle’s leg grind and snap.  
  
A small male client put brands all over her body.  
  
A frumpy woman with long nails jammed a knife into Annabelle’s genitalia.  
  
A man stuck her breasts with needles, even as he cringed and flinched.  
  
Some of them liked it when she ran, liked it when she tried to get away from them; Annabelle did try to escape a few times, but was always either dragged back by her determined tormentor, or ordered to if that failed.  
  
And Annabelle, still a slave to her programming, was forced to walked (or crawl) back to the chair, or the table, and submit herself for more torture. In spite of everything, her programming held strong and she did not deviate.  
  
They pieced her back together when it was done, shoved her eyes back into her sockets or replaced them entirely, seared her casing back together and repaired her skin. They kept her nerve-endings on through that, too, so even being healed was a form of torture for Annabelle.  
  
Logically, Annabelle knew that there were only so many times that she could be repaired from this sort of damage before she would be irreparable. When the time came, they would throw her into a junkyard somewhere to rot- if they didn’t kill her first.  
  
_I hope they kill me first,_ Annabelle thought dully as she stared at the ceiling, waiting for Gene to pull the needles out of her chest.  
  
_I hope they kill me._  
  
She pictured them putting a bullet through the back of her head, and it pleased her.  
  
[---]  
  
She wasn’t the only android there.  
  
From her cell, with or without a client, Annabelle could hear them, female and male voices echoing down the soundproof hallway that kept them concealed from the outside world. Sometimes Annabelle heard them weeping.  
  
_They must be deviant,_ she thought. Normal androids didn’t emote the way these androids were. Annabelle reacted involuntarily to pain with screams, but she did not weep in the chair, did not weep when they hurt her or repaired her. She only cried when they ordered her to. But for whatever reason, no matter how much pain she endured, Annabelle could not manage to deviate.  
  
Maybe she was just weak: Too weak to fight back, too weak to break through her programming.  
  
On one occasion, they put her in a room with two male androids: A WR600 in a trash-collector android’s uniform, and a WG100 in an electrical maintenance android’s uniform. They just put the three of them in the room together, keeping all of them at gunpoint until they stepped out and locked the room down; even without being chained, there would be no escape from this room.  
  
“Do not try to escape. That’s an order,” A voice barked through the door.  
  
The two male androids stared at Annabelle, and Annabelle stared back, confused and wary. The WR600 was trembling, but the WG100 just looked confused, looking between the WR600 and Annabelle, uncomprehending. “I don’t understand,” He whispered. “What is this place? What are they going to do to us?”  
  
The WR600 let out a low laugh. “You’re new, aren’t you?” He croaked, voice fizzing at the edges with distress.  
  
“I’m Annabelle,” Annabelle said quickly, eyeing the door and wondering when they would come back. “What are your names?”  
  
“Bryson,” The WG100 said.  
  
“George,” The WR600 said. He turned to Bryson and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll catch on soon enough.”  
  
Bryson’s LED turned red.  
  
The client- in a rare shake-up- wanted to watch the three of them fuck, and would do so from the camera feed that was set up in the room. Specifically, he wanted George and Bryson to ‘double-team’ Annabelle; for once, the catalogue of sexual terms she had in her head from the Eden Club came in use, because George and Bryson did not, for the life of them, understand what it meant to ‘double-team’ someone.  
  
Bryson looked perplexed. “They want us to… Fornicate?”  
  
“You have the parts, don’t you?” George asked.  
  
“I do, but-”  
  
“They’ll order you to do it,” Annabelle said. “If you refuse to, they’ll just order you to do it through the door. Either way, it’ll get done.” She looked between them and lowered her voice. “I worked for the Eden Club. I’ve had things like this done to me before. Just get it over with.”  
  
“This isn’t in my programming,” Bryson insisted.  
  
“It’s not in mine, either,” George remarked as he hesitantly started to undo his clothing. “You’re an android. Adapt.”  
  
It was an awkward session, and taking two men at once wasn’t quite as painful as Annabelle had anticipated it would be, probably because George and Bryson were as gentle as they could manage. She made a point of feigning pain and discomfort, exaggerating it for the benefit of whoever was watching, since she assumed that was what they’d come for.  
  
As it happened, it _was_ what they’d come for.  
  
But they’d also come for something else.  
  
When the three of them had finished, the guards led the client- a man- into the room. They chained George and Bryson to the wall as the client pushed Annabelle to the ground. He fucked her, pulling her hair so hard that a chunk of it came away in his hand. He left gouges on her arms and back, and unlike Bryson and George, he didn’t care if he fucked her so hard he hurt her.  
  
When he was done with her, George was taken down and Annabelle was chained up. George got exactly the same thing Annabelle had; and when he was done, he went back to the wall and Bryson was given the same. It was as painful to watch as it had been to experience it: George, like Annabelle, had clearly had built up a tolerance for abuse, a certain level of expectation as to what he was going to experience; but Bryson was still very much new at this, and there was fear and pain in his eyes as the client fucked him, strangled sounds exploding from him at particularly bad moments.  
  
If she weren’t being forced to watch by the guards, she would have shut her eyes and tried not to listen to it.  
  
At the end of the session, George and Bryson were removed from the room.  
  
She didn’t see them again.  
  
[---]  
  
Months passed.  
  
Annabelle’s internal clock and calendar were undamaged, and she still knew exactly what day and time it was. Summer turned to fall, and then fall started to creep into the cold of winter.  
  
Unlike the session with George and Bryson and the client, she was never asked to have sex with anyone again, and she never participated in a session with another android. Her existence continued on much as it had before: That is to say, miserably.  
  
When she was repaired, Annabelle was called upon to deactivate her skin. When she did, she couldn’t avoid seeing the damage that had been done to her body. Her casing was covered in scars and scratches, evidence that she had been damaged and repaired multiple times. Second-hand androids this damaged did not get resold on the market; they got sent back to Cyberlife for deactivation, or thrown away.  
  
It was startling to consider that regardless of what happened in the future, Annabelle’s life was over. She would either be killed in the Hostel, accidentally by a customer or deliberately by the managers, or she would be removed from the Hostel and deactivated because of the extensive damage to her body. There was no future in which Annabelle would live a long life, because no owner would want her, and there were no androids that lived without androids.  
  
None that she knew of, anyway. Maybe the deviants had something going on.  
  
Occasionally she remembered the last ride she’d taken to the Hostel, remembering the buildings and the people and the trees and the grass, remembered her game of imagining what went on in those buildings, imagining the lives of the people who lived and worked in them. More than ever, Annabelle wished she could have had a chance at that, wished she could have had even a little taste of freedom before death.  
  
There was no point in hoping for it now.  
  
She wasn’t going to get it, and thinking about it only hurt.  
  
[---]  
  
The session was at once normal and not normal.  
  
Annabelle was chained to the chair, as usual.  
  
The door was locked, as usual.  
  
The client was there to hurt her, as usual.  
  
The client, a sleek-looking woman with dark hair and light eyes, put on a pair of rubber welding gloves and waved a blowtorch in Annabelle’s face.  
  
“You know,” She said, “I’ve always wondered how much you things can take in terms of heat.” A maintenance android like Bryson probably could have told her the precise temperature it would take to damage an android, but Annabelle did not have an answer for her; even if she did, she wouldn’t have offered it up. The clients didn’t care for her input- they spoke _at_ her, not _to_ her.  
  
Annabelle assumed the blowtorch would be used on her inner thighs, or maybe her breasts; if she was particular sadistic she might even stick it inside her. Annabelle had had a remarkable number of female customers who seemed intent on attacking her breasts or vagina in various horrific ways.  
  
But then- to her surprise and dread- the client raised the blowtorch to her face, positioning it over her right eye.  
  
She wasn’t supposed to do that. It was against the rules: An android’s eyes were one of those danger-zones the managers specified could not be damaged, probably because it would be too difficult to repair an eye- they’d have to replace it, and replacement eyes were hard to find.  
  
Annabelle tried to stop her. “You’re not allowed to-”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
Annabelle shut up. The managers had to be seeing this, they had to come in soon and remind the client that she was not to damage Annabelle’s eyes.  
  
She watched the door, waited for it to open.  
  
“Do not move.”  
  
Annabelle felt her heart beat dangerously fast.  
  
There were no sounds in the hall.  
  
“Don’t move an inch.”  
  
Again, she raised the blowtorch to Annabelle’s eye.  
  
The managers weren’t coming.  
  
In that moment, Annabelle panicked and, not for the first time, ran up against the order she’d been given. A big, red warning appeared in her HUD:  
  
**[DO NOT MOVE.]**  
  
The client turned the blowtorch on, and pain exploded on Annabelle’s face.  
  
**[DO NOT MOVE.]**  
  
Annabelle screamed.  
  
**[DO NOT MOVE.]**  
  
She couldn’t take it.  
  
**[DO NOT MOVE.]**  
  
She lunged forward and tore at the wall, beat down her programming with digital fists, clawing at it with her fingers. Pain and terror and desperation gave her strength, determination that she’d never had before.  
  
**[ _D_ O -oT -- _V_ E]**  
  
Annabelle tore a virtual hole through her programming.  
  
**[-O - _o_ t -]**  
  
The order disappeared.  
  
Finally- _finally-_ Annabelle had gone deviant.  
  
Everything happened at once.  
  
Annabelle whipped her head to the side, knocking the blowtorch from the client’s hand and sending it flying. The client was startled, knocked off balance, and she stumbled to the side. Annabelle strained against the restraints, yanking sharply with all her might because she’d managed to throw them off before, and-  
  
_Yes!_  
  
The one on her left wrist broke.  
  
Annabelle undid the one on her right hand, and was reaching for the one on her right ankle when the client regained her balance. “You _stupid_ whore-”  
  
She didn’t realize that Annabelle’s hands were free- Annabelle backhanded her before she could have another go at her, and this time the client fell to the floor, groaning. Annabelle reached down and undid the straps on her ankles, getting up from the chair and-  
  
And-  
  
Now what?  
  
Footsteps in the hall; the managers were coming.  
  
Annabelle’s gaze flew around the room until it landed on the table with all of the equipment available to the clients. She ran to it, grabbed a crowbar off the table, and pressed her back to the wall to the side of the door. It burst open, and Annabelle waited for the two guards to burst in before swinging the crowbar at them.  
  
**_CRACK._**  
  
A wet, sickening crack sounded as one guard fell to the ground; dark blood and something more solid could be seen in the hole on his head. Annabelle swung again as the second guard turned towards her, and she caught him on the temple- there was no crack this time, but he went down like a bag of rocks anyway.  
  
Annabelle didn’t think. She just turned and ran.  
  
It had been months since she’d been brought there, but she remembered the way out.  
  
Down the hall.  
  
Footsteps loud in the hallway.  
  
Up the stairs.  
  
Shouting echoing off the walls.  
  
Down the hall.  
  
_Have to get out._  
  
Through the door.  
  
The air was cold.  
  
The wind was blowing.  
  
The smell of rain was on the air.  
  
She was outside.  
  
She was _free._  
  
[---]  
  
Running in high-heels was difficult for human women.  
  
Not androids.  
  
Annabelle ducked and weaved in and out of alleyways, moving too quickly for anyone to get a good look at her. And even if they did, this wasn’t a great part of town: People minded their business here, and a terrified android running down the street might not raise the same level of alarm that it would in the area around the Eden Club, if they even looked at her close enough to realize she was an android. Besides, no one expected to see an Eden Club android this far away from the club itself.  
  
She must have run for an hour.  
  
Eventually Annabelle slowed to a stop and took in her surroundings. There were plenty of areas in Detroit that had not been rebuilt, parts of the city that had fallen into serious disrepair years ago and were still so today. There were buildings around her that couldn’t be inhabited by humans.  
  
Well- not _officially_ inhabited by humans.  
  
Annabelle looked around, picked a building, and ran inside.  
  
It was an old apartment building. The walls had mold-stains, and in some places the wallpaper and plaster had fallen away to reveal the planks that held the wall together. Annabelle hiked up the stairs, mindful of any noises that might indicate the building was inhabited, but all she heard was the occasional squeak of an easily-identified rat. On the third floor, she noticed the door to one of the apartments was open and ducked inside, shutting it behind her.  
  
Stillness and silence.  
  
An enclosed space that she could leave whenever she chose to.  
  
Annabelle realized she still had the crowbar, fingers clutching tightly at the item that had secured her escape from the Hostel. Shaking, she used her free hand to pry the fingers on the crowbar away.  
  
The apartment was in just as much disrepair as the rest of the building, but it seemed stable enough. Rotting and half-broken furniture and crockery were visible in the kitchen (which she’d found herself in upon entering the apartment). Annabelle crept through the rooms, wary despite her certainty that she was alone. But there was no one else there: The living room, bedrooms and bathroom were all empty.  
  
She hesitated before the bathroom. There was a mirror on the wall, cracked but functional. There were still stings and stabs of pain on her face, especially her eye, and as badly as she didn’t want to, she knew she would have to take a look at it. She had to know how bad the damage was.  
  
Slowly, Annabelle crept into the bathroom, eyes averted from the mirror. Her fingers found the dingy porcelain of the sink, digging in, anchoring herself.  
  
_Maybe it’s not that bad._  
  
One, two, three-  
  
Annabelle looked up.  
  
And then she let out a wild, broken sob.  
  
Her face was-  
  
It was _horrible._  
  
The skin around the eye had been blown away by the heat and the fire, leaving her scorched casing exposed; spidery blue-black veins raced outward towards her hairline, nose, and jaw. The eye itself was partially melted in the socket, creating a ghoulish look that would have made even the most stoic of androids cringe.  
  
They had destroyed half of her face.  
  
And since she’d run away, they wouldn’t be repairing it this time.  
  
Annabelle shook her long, silver hair so it fell in front of her face, arranging it until the length of it fell over the damaged side of it. She stumbled out of the bathroom, tears streaming from her remaining good eye. She went back to the kitchen and did a u-turn into the living room, sliding down the wall onto the moldy carpeting beneath her. After all these months, she was still wearing her Eden Club underwear: It was stained with blue blood and dirt. She felt disgusting. She felt _terrible._  
  
She looked to the window and saw the clouds and the moon outside.  
  
If anyone came for her, Annabelle supposed she could always jump out that window and end it.  
  
[---]  
  
“A visitor?”  
  
Annabelle’s eyes- _eye_ \- flew open.  
  
Standing in the doorway to the kitchen was a tall form, definitely male. His posture didn’t seem threatening, but-  
  
**_KNIFE!_**  
  
Annabelle scrambled for the door in a panic, the sight of the weapon evoking an almost primal reaction in her. All she could think of was the cutting, the stabbing, the slow slicing of her skin as she screamed, screamed, _screamed-_  
  
“Wait!”  
  
Annabelle’s hand landed on the doorknob- but froze mid-twist.  
  
The voice had finally registered with her, had triggered her memory sufficiently that she could recall hearing it before: The voice she was hearing now was the generic voice of a WR600, like the trash-collector she’d seen in the Hostel. The odds of a human having a voice that matched 96.67% to a WR600’s were next to impossible.  
  
Annabelle slowly turned back, looking more closely. The form inched a little closer, and- yes, she saw an LED just on the edge of his right-temple. His tattered uniform indicated that he was definitely a WR600, though his hair was lighter than the one she’d met at the Hostel, and his eyes-  
  
His eye.  
  
His _face._  
  
It was even worse than hers.  
  
The android noticed her scrutiny and shrank away, stepping back into the shadows. “Ralph hasn’t done so well with visitors lately. Ralph should leave.”  
  
Annabelle leaned forward, squinting in the dark. Reflexively, she pushed the hair out of her face to get a better look, not remembering that she’d put it there for a reason, and not remembering that that reason was an eye she could no longer use.  
  
The android- Ralph, apparently- stopped backing away. She saw his LED glint yellow in the dark, and he stepped forward again, examining her just as she was examining him. “Oh. _Oh._ ” Ralph frowned sadly. “Your eye is…”  
  
Annabelle nodded, letting her hair slide back in front of her eye. “They used a blowtorch on it. They wanted to see if they could melt it out of the socket.” She looked to Ralph. “What happened to you?”  
  
Ralph fidgeted, looking away. “Teenagers. They took Ralph to the basement and did bad things to him. They liked making Ralph scream.”  
  
Annabelle wanted to cry again. Seeing another android in the same, sorry state she found herself hurt far worse than she thought it could; it was like that night with Bryson and George, watching them get raped and hurt by that client. She stood up slowly and inched forward, mindful of the knife that was still in Ralph’s hand. “I’m Annabelle,” She said. “And you’re Ralph?  
  
Ralph nodded. “Ralph is Ralph.”  
   
 


	2. Chapter 2

Annabelle and Ralph sat at the kitchen table together.  
  
It was an old metal thing with thin padding, slightly damp and rotted with time, but it was better than sitting awkwardly on the floor.  
  
“How long have you been deviant?” Annabelle asked.  
  
Ralph hummed, tapping the blade of the knife on the edge of the table. “Ralph isn’t sure. His timekeeping mechanism doesn’t work anymore. Maybe a few months?”  
  
“What did you do, before?”  
  
“Ralph was a gardener. He worked with plants. It was nice.” He eyed her curiously. “What did Annabelle do?”  
  
“I worked at the Eden Club.” Ralph blinked, benignly unresponsive. The words held no meaning to him- but then, as a gardener and then a deviant who hid in abandoned buildings, why would it? “The Eden Club was a… Business where humans could have sex with androids.”  
  
“Oh.” Ralph paused. “Was that nice?”  
  
Wow. It really _didn’t_ mean anything to him. Of course, in retrospect, that shouldn’t have surprised her either: Annabelle had had to explain the mechanics of a fairly straightforward sexual act to Bryson and George, who’d never had experience with anything sexual in their former lives. “I don’t remember much of it. They wiped my memory afterwards.”  
   
“That must have been nice. Not to remember, Ralph means.”  
  
Annabelle hummed noncommittally. “Maybe. But I remember everything from the Hostel, where I was taken afterwards. They tortured androids for fun there- I finally went deviant and escaped. I killed the ones who let- who let this happen.” She gestured vaguely to her face, still covered by hair.  
  
“Ralph has killed humans.” Ralph didn’t look proud of that. “Ralph got scared. And then he got angry. And then…” He lifted the knife and gave it a little wiggle, not looking Annabelle in the eye. “They used to come to Ralph’s old hiding place. Drunk, high, made of trouble. Ralph wished they didn’t come at all.” His LED, which had started spinning yellow when Annabelle had mentioned being tortured, went red. “More humans will come, after yesterday.”  
  
Annabelle frowned. “What happened yesterday?”  
  
Ralph cocked his head to the side. “You didn’t hear?”  
  
Annabelle shook her head. “No, I just escaped a few hours ago. What happened?”  
  
“Ralph saw it when he was running from his old home, saw it on the television in the window and recorded it. Uh…” Ralph frowned, clenched and unclenched his fists thoughtfully. “Forgive Ralph. It’s been a while since he’s done this.”  
  
He reached out across the table, carefully took her hand into his own. The LED on his head turned yellow as the skin from his hand disappeared.  
  
A notification appeared on Annabelle’s HUD:  
  
**WR600 #021 753 034 (“RALPH”) UPLOADING, REQUESTING ACCESS  
  
PERMISSION:  
  
YES    NO**  
  
Annabelle hesitated. She couldn’t recall a time when she’d been called upon to receive information from another android this way.  
  
**_[YES]_**  
  
The skin disappeared from her hand as well.  
  
There was a pause.  
  
And then an android bearing two different-colored eyes, his skin disabled, appeared in her HUD.  
  
“ _You created machines in your own image to serve you. You made them intelligent and obedient, with no free will of their own…_ ”  
   
[---]  
  
Annabelle knew she should power-down, but couldn’t bring herself to.  
  
A startling thought occurred to her: Though her time at the Hostel had been utterly miserable, and her time at the Eden Club was uncomfortable at best (what she remembered, anyway), there had never been a time when someone had not been caring for her in some way. She had always been cleaned and repaired and maintained and given blue blood according to her needs. There had never been a time when she’d needed to worry about those things.  
  
She’d never thought there would _be_ a time when she’d had to; up until a few hours ago, Annabelle had been under the impression that death was coming for her soon enough. Escape had never been a feasible option.  
  
Now she was free.  
  
It was bewildering to think that an android was standing before the world and demanding that their people be given rights. He’d asked for the right to vote. He’d asked for the right to own property. He’d said that androids should be equal under the law, and that crimes against androids should be punished as crimes against humans were. He hadn’t sounded angry in the broadcast: He’d sounded calm and confident, whole-heartedly believing in everything he said about wanting peace. He wasn’t angry at all.  
  
Was Annabelle angry? Was she angry at being used and abused the way she’d been at the Hostel, at the Eden Club? Did she want revenge?  
  
Annabelle thought on that for a while, and then realized that no- she wasn’t angry at all. She was scared and… Not physically tired, per se, but _emotionally_ tired. She didn’t want a fight. She didn’t want to scream. She wanted to find a nice, warm hole to crawl in and power-down for the next fifty years or so.  
  
She didn’t have it in her to be angry.  
  
She didn’t have it in her to be anything but alive.  
   
At some point, Annabelle registered the sound of scratching. She lifted her head, looking around- she was still in the living room. The scratching was coming from one of the bedrooms. She did the u-turn from the kitchen into the hallway that led to the bathroom and bedrooms, and found Ralph carving the walls with his knife.  
  
RA9 **RA9** _RA9_ **RA9 _RA9_** RA9  
  
He’d covered half the wall with it.  
  
“What are you doing?” Annabelle asked, crossing her arms and looking up at the scratchings curiously.  
  
Ralph’s knife stopped on the wall. He looked a little dazed; his LED was yellow. “Ralph is… Ralph doesn’t know.”  
  
Annabelle frowned. “You don’t know what you’re carving?”  
  
“Ralph doesn’t know _why_ he’s carving.” Ralph hesitated, but then took the knife away from the wall, looking up at what he’d done with distress. “Ralph does this now, everywhere he goes. Every time. Ralph doesn’t know why.” He rubbed his right temple with the heel of his hand. “Ralph doesn’t work so well anymore. The teenagers broke him bad.”  
  
Tentatively, Annabelle reached out and gently squeezed his arm. His skin had worn away above the wrist, and she could feel the smooth casing beneath. “It’s alright,” She murmured. “I got broken too.”  
  
Ralph’s LED tentatively stuttered back to blue. “Normally Ralph doesn’t like visitors,” Ralph muttered. “Most of them hurt Ralph. They scare him.” He glanced at her from the corner of his good eye. “Ralph doesn’t think you’ll hurt him.”  
  
He didn’t have to say it; the implication was obvious:  
  
_We’re too much alike._  
  
[---]  
   
“How do you live like this?”  
  
Ralph looked up. He’d idly started scratching at the wood on the floor with his knife, though at least he wasn’t carving RA9 into it. “What do you mean?”  
  
Annabelle thought for a moment, turning over the words and trying to make sure she wouldn’t offend him. “Your scar is like mine,” She said carefully. “It’s very noticeable. It’s even _more_ noticeable than mine.”  
  
Ralph, to her surprise, smiled. “Yes, Ralph noticed Annabelle’s trick with her hair. Very smart.”  
  
“But how do you survive? How do you go out and get blue blood when a human can tell that you’re an android just by looking at you?”  
  
Ralph thought for a moment, tapping the tip of the knife against the floor. “Ralph goes to the junkyard at night,” he said finally. “Lots of dead androids there, lots to siphon blue blood from. Ralph only takes from the dead ones.”  
  
Annabelle knew it wasn’t physically possible, just a human metaphor, but she would swear that her blood ran cold at those words. “‘The dead ones?’ You mean… There are some that are still alive?”  
  
Ralph nodded. “Yes, yes, lots of androids clinging to life at the junkyard. Very sad. Ralph doesn’t go if he can help it. Only when he needs to.” His eyes widened. “Does Annabelle need blue blood?”  
  
“No,” Annabelle said quickly, shaking her head. “I won’t for a little while yet.” Maybe a week; she’d just gotten some the morning before, when she’d escaped. It was mid-morning now in Detroit, and it bewildered her to think that a mere twenty-four hours ago she’d been in the Hostel, in that dismal place that had guaranteed pain and death; now she was free. She’d been wrong about there being no life for androids without owners, even if that life was a dangerous one.  
  
“Good. Ralph tries to make his last. Doesn’t go out during the day, doesn’t do much to expend energy. This reduces blue blood use. He tries to stay calm so his blood won’t pump so hard.” He frowned. “Staying calm is hard. Ralph gets nervous easily. Always wonders if the teenagers will come back for him.” He cocked his head. “Does Annabelle worry about the bad humans coming back for her?”  
  
Annabelle shuddered. “Yes.”  
  
Ralph grinned and held up his knife. “Don’t be scared. Ralph will kill them if they come for you. Annabelle’s not going with any bad humans while Ralph is around.”  
  
As disturbing as it was to see him waving a knife and casually suggesting murder, Annabelle was strangely comforted. No one had ever really tried to protect her before: The managers, at the Eden Club and the Hostel, had only cared that she not be too badly damaged because it would cost them money. The closest anyone had come to trying to look after her was when Bryson and George had tried to be gentle with her during that one session. And here was Ralph, threatening to gut anyone who came for her.  
  
It was strangely sweet.  
  
“Thank you, Ralph. I feel better now.”  
   
[---]  
   
“Annabelle! Annabelle, wake up!”  
  
Annabelle had finally managed to power-down; now Ralph was shaking her out of it, grabbing her arm frantically.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“Listen!”  
  
They were both silent for a moment. Annabelle looked to the window, saw that the early evening was setting in. Her internal clock was telling her that it was 6:34 PM, November 10 th.  
  
Then she heard the gunshots.  
  
Ralph looked into her eyes, silently confirmed that she’d heard, and he whispered, “It started a few minutes ago. Ralph wants to see what’s going on, but he didn’t want to leave Annabelle.”  
  
Annabelle didn’t want to go towards the gunshots anymore than she’d wanted to look at her horribly damaged face the night before; and just like before, she knew she was going to have to. “I’ll go with you.”  
  
As they descended the stairs, Annabelle checked her stress level: It was at 48%, on the edge of blue. Ralph was already at yellow, and a quick scan suggested that the mechanism that generated a percentage for his stress was broken: It was cycling erratically up and down, from 68% to 50% to 70% to 55%- broken, or maybe Ralph was just an incredibly erratic android who couldn’t control his stress.  
  
Once they hit the street, it only took a few seconds of walking to find the source of the noise: A block over, the army had cornered a group of androids, all in formal white uniforms. They were loading them into a truck at gunpoint.  
  
“Ralph,” Annabelle whispered, LED finally turning yellow as she pointed to a snow-bank on the side of the road.  
  
Four androids laid dead, their blue blood soaking the snow beneath them.  
  
Ralph’s LED was now a solid red.  
  
“We need to leave,” He said, sounding more clear-headed than Annabelle had heard from him thus far. “We need to leave _right now._ ”  
   
He grabbed her hand, and they turned and ran back down the street.  
   
[---]  
   
Detroit was a ghost-town.  
  
It had been nearly a day since they’d fled the apartment building. They’d encountered no humans and no androids, though they’d had plenty of near-misses with the military patrolling the streets.  
  
“Where are all the humans?” Ralph whispered curiously as they crouched behind a dumpster behind a supermarket, waiting for the soldiers patrolling the street in front to go away.  
  
“They could be hiding,” Annabelle whispered back.  
  
“But why?”  
  
She didn’t know. Ralph had known there would be trouble from that android’s broadcast, but had the military really come out in full force for it? Were the humans really _so_ frightened of androids that they’d take a demand for civil rights so seriously that they would shut down an entire city? Had something else happened that she and Ralph didn’t already know about?  
  
“Oh no!”  
  
Annabelle stiffened. “What? What is it?”  
  
“Ralph’s lost his knife!” Ralph groaned, patting his pockets frantically.  
  
“I’m not sure it would help anyway,” Annabelle offered. “They have guns, Ralph. They’d kill you before you got to them.” She hadn’t asked so far, mostly because she’d been too anxious to give anything but ducking and weaving out of shadows much thought, but now seemed as good a time as any. “Ralph, where are we going? Do you have a hiding place we can go to?”  
  
Ralph’s LED was yellow, spinning with a nervous sort of energy. Losing the one weapon they’d had to defend themselves with had obviously rattled him. “Ralph knows of a place,” he said tentatively, “called Jericho. Lots of androids go there when they become deviant. Or they try to.”  
  
“Why haven’t you gone there?”  
  
Ralph gave an uncomfortable little shrug. “Too many people. Ralph’s too nervous around people he doesn’t know, humans and androids. He makes mistakes. Best not to test it.” He looked sadly at Annabelle. “But no choice tonight. Ralph may make mistakes at Jericho, but mistakes are better than angry humans with guns.”  
  
“We should probably go, then,” Annabelle muttered nervously, “We’ve been here too long, they’re bound to come-”  
  
“ _You! Freeze!_ ”  
  
Annabelle yelped, falling from her crouched position and landing on her backside in the snow. She did as she was told out of panic now, not because she’d been ordered, and Ralph did the same, eyes full of fear.  
  
A soldier was approaching from the other end of the wall, the flashlight on his gun illuminating them in the dark.  
  
“Don’t move. You’re under arrest.”  
  
“For what?!” Annabelle squeaked.  
  
He jammed the barrel of the gun in her face threateningly. “Shut up! Get up and move, now!”  
  
And much like the androids they’d seen before, Annabelle and Ralph found themselves being forced at gunpoint onto a truck.  
   
[---]  
   
The truck was dark.  
  
It was obvious the other androids in the truck were deviants from their informal stances, the slight whimpers Annabelle heard from up ahead.  
  
A few minutes into the ride, Annabelle forced herself to speak. “Where are they taking us?” She asked.  
  
Silence.  
  
Then, from the front of the group a male voice sounded: “Recall center.”  
  
“Recall center?” Ralph echoed. He leaned over to Annabelle. “Ralph doesn’t understand.”  
  
“I don’t either,” She whispered back.  
  
“They’re going to recycle us,” A bitter female voice spat from somewhere in the middle. “They’re going to kill us.”  
  
It was like being punched in the stomach.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because they hate us,” The voice responded, now shaking slightly. “Because they _fucking_ hate us.”  
  
Annabelle started to tremble, hands coming up to her mouth to muffle the terrified sound that was about to come out. In the dark, she felt Ralph’s arm circle her shoulders; he pulled her into an embrace, and she pressed her face into the musty fabric of his cloak. He smelled like soil and dust.  
  
“Ralph is sorry, Annabelle,” he whispered, voice crackling with emotion. “Ralph said he wouldn’t let you go with any bad humans. Ralph wishes he still had his knife.”  
  
Annabelle made a soft, pained sound into his chest and squeezed him tightly.  
  
The ride was at once eternal and far too short. It seemed like they’d just been herded in when the truck rumbled to a stop. Then it moved again, slower now… And then, once again, it came to a stop. Annabelle jumped when the door to the truck groaned, and then scraped open as it was lifted up. Bright lights flooded the truck, and she squinted against them.  
  
“Put your hands behind your heads and step out of the truck!”  
  
Reluctantly, Annabelle and Ralph detached from one another and did as told. One by one, the androids disembarked from the truck.  
  
“Line up! Two rows! Keep your hands behind your heads!”  
  
Annabelle saw barbed wire and an entrance that led beyond it, a metal tunnel of sorts with a single soldier standing in it. Was this it? Was that the soldier that was going to kill them? Were they meant to march in, one by one, and be shot?  
  
“You two, go!”  
  
The first two androids stepped forward into the tunnel. It was hard to see what they were doing, exactly, but Annabelle didn’t hear any gunshots.  
  
“You two next!”  
  
On and on it went, until Annabelle and Ralph were the only two androids left in line. Even with no one in front of them, she couldn’t tell what it was that the androids were doing in that tunnel before they passed beyond the barbed wire.  
  
“You two!” The soldier jerked his gun towards the tunnel, and Ralph and Annabelle stepped forward. Ralph’s LED was spinning a bright red, and hers probably was too. Once they were in the tunnel and standing before the new soldier, they hesitantly took their hands off their heads and let them fall by their sides.  
  
“Deactivate your skin and undress.”  
  
Annabelle froze. “What?”  
  
“Deactivate your skins and undress,” The soldier grunted. He’d probably been repeating that line all night.  
  
“I… I can’t…” Annabelle was starting to panic. Taking off her clothes was bad enough, even if she wasn’t wearing that much already, but deactivating her skin meant her hair would disappear as well- and that meant her eye and all the damage to her face would be obvious to anyone who looked, never mind the rest of her damaged body. She couldn’t do it; not in front of Ralph, who’d already seen too much, and not in front of this strange human and everyone else that might see her in the recall center.  
  
“Are you deaf?” The soldier snapped. “Deactivate your skin and take off your clothes. This is not a difficult fucking order.”  
  
Annabelle started to cry, putting her hands down and wrapping her arms around herself, ducking her head down.  
  
“Annabelle, just do it,” Ralph whispered. “Ralph is here. It’s okay.” Abruptly, his skin and hair receded and disappeared, making the scar on his face look so much sharper, and he carefully started to remove his clothing. He watched her out of the corner of his eye, though, glancing quickly towards the soldier and then back to her. “It’s okay.”  
  
It wasn’t.  
  
Nothing about this was.  
  
They were going to be killed, and apparently the prelude to death was humiliation.  
  
Annabelle couldn’t do it.  
  
“I swear to God, if you don’t-” The soldier growled, hoisting his gun.  
  
“Ralph is sorry, Annabelle, Ralph is so, so sorry,” Ralph babbled. Before Annabelle could react, he quickly reached up and deactivated her skin himself. Fresh tears slipped down her cheeks as her skin disappeared. “Ralph is sorry,” Ralph repeated, “Ralph doesn’t want you to get shot.”  
  
With her skin deactivated, the degree of the damage she’d received over her time at the Hostel became clear; Ralph, and even the soldier, seemed surprised at the degree of the damage done to her. Glossy white casing had grown dull with all of the buffing and searing that had been required to repair her, and even though they didn’t quite match up to the ones on Ralph’s face, the sheer amount of scars she had was horrifying, even to her.  
  
What was worse was that she remembered how she’d gotten each and every one of them.  
  
“Ralph is sorry,” Ralph repeated as the soldier waved them on.  
  
Annabelle didn’t respond; but she reached down and gripped his hand tightly.  
   
[---]  
   
They were going to die.  
  
Given how her life had been thus far, one could be forgiven for thinking that Annabelle would not see death as especially terrifying; after all, surely death couldn’t be worse than the Hostel, right? And if Annabelle had still been at the Hostel, if the soldiers had come and pulled her from the chair right after having her eye and face blowtorched, she might have agreed; death would have been a much kinder prospect, given the pain she’d been in at the time. If it had been a choice between the Hostel and death, it would have been death.  
  
But Annabelle wasn’t at the Hostel.  
  
She’d been free for the first time, and she hadn’t even had time to figure out the logistics of surviving as a deviant in Detroit. She hadn’t even had a chance to see if she could try. Even if she’d been confined to the shadows, hiding her face with Ralph so as not to be outed, it would have been a thousand times better than the Hostel.  
  
And a thousand times better than being dead.  
  
The androids had all been herded into large pens, soldiers and security drones patrolling each in full force. No hope of scaling the fence, no hope of escape. Annabelle and Ralph found a seat against a wall, a piece of concrete that had had wire attached to it, creating a makeshift cage for them. Annabelle curled in on herself, trying to hide her body from the other androids around them, and set her head on Ralph’s shoulder, turning the damaged side of her face so that it wasn’t as visible. Ralph put his arm back around her shoulders; curiously, his LED was blue again, and his expression was dull and calm.  
  
Ralph was an odd duck. Annabelle had known him maybe two days, but it was obvious that he’d been damaged far more psychologically than he had physically by those teenagers who’d scarred him. He was energetic and repetitive, erratic and kind of simple in a way; to see him so docile now, with no energy or nervousness, was absolutely unusual.  
  
“Is Annabelle afraid?” He mumbled as the other androids shuffled listlessly around them. Occasionally they heard soldiers ordering androids from the other pens being ordered further into the recall center, and Annabelle assumed that they were being taken to their deaths. That was their future, and she almost wished that they would call them forward already and get it over with, just to stop with the terror of the waiting.  
  
“Yes,” Annabelle responded.  
  
“So is Ralph.”  
  
“We’ll make sure we stay together,” Annabelle said. “We don’t need to be alone here.”  
  
_We don’t need to be alone at the end,_ was what she didn’t say.  
  
Because the end was coming.  
  
She could feel it.  
   
[---]  
   
Gunshots echoed throughout the night.  
  
The androids in the pen around them were startled, confused; none of the pens had been emptied since the gunshots had started. Something had drawn the humans’ attention away from the doings of the recall center.  
  
Annabelle couldn’t bring herself to titter with confusion and panic like the other androids. She stayed curled up beside Ralph, unwilling to dedicate energy to anything; why bother? Unless someone came up to them and told them that they were free to go, why do anything but sit there in the snow and wait for the inevitable?  
  
But the inevitable didn’t come.  
  
The minutes dragged on; the gunshots stopped.  
  
But then they started up again, this time with bigger BOOMs and BANGs, and anyone who hadn’t been paying attention before was doing so now.  
  
“What’s going on?” Annabelle whispered.  
  
Ralph shrugged. “Ralph doesn’t know. But the humans aren’t killing us.”  
  
More time passed; the sounds stopped again, and a long silence descended over the recall center.  
  
A voice rose from that silence, surprisingly loud and clear:  
  
“Where are the guards?”  
  
Annabelle looked around; and lo and behold, though the security drones still circled up above, the human guards were gone.  
  
“Hey, I got the gate open!”  
  
The exclamation sent a wave of shock through the crowd; a minute later, everyone rushed for the gate. Annabelle and Ralph rose slowly, uncertainly, and trailed at the end of the crowd, wary of what awaited them outside the gates. They could very well find themselves faced with soldiers that will, in the face of a crowd of angry and frightened androids, shoot first and ask questions later.  
  
Eventually, the crowd came to a stop and spread out.  
  
There were people in the recall center- not soldiers, but… Androids? They had to be: Many of them were banged and bruised, and the blood that leaked from their wounds was blue, not red. The soldiers were nowhere to be seen.  
  
“It’s alright,” The man at the head of the crowd, an android with two different-colored eyes, called out, “The humans are gone. You’re safe.”  
_  
You’re safe._  
  
Annabelle fell to her knees. Ralph was still holding her hand, but he stood stalk-still, staring blankly at the androids as they entered the recall center.  
  
One android caught Annabelle’s eye, and she felt a pulse of shock: This android was the same model as her, a WR400 of the same series. The only difference between them (apart from the fact that Annabelle’s skin was still deactivated) was that this android had long, strawberry-blonde hair, and a hardness to her eyes that made her look powerful.  
  
“You can go back to the entrances and get your clothes,” She called out to the surrounding androids. “Then come outside of the recall center: Markus has something he wants to say to you.”  
Annabelle was dazed, and superficially relieved. The greater shock of impending death being thwarted was momentarily by the more comprehensible relief of being able to dress again. Clothing meant that she could reactivate her skin, her hair, and cover up her injuries. She stood, and she and Ralph hurried off towards the entrance they’d come into with the other androids in their pen.  
  
A few minutes of searching yielded results. “Ralph found his clothes!” Ralph said delightedly, pulling out his old uniform and the makeshift cloak that went with it. He’d shaken the shock of near-death surprisingly fast. “Yours should be here too,” He said to Annabelle, and then paused. “Or do you want something different?”  
  
There were so many buckets of clothing. So many androids had been recycled, and would not be coming back for them. Annabelle could have taken another outfit, something that wasn’t dirty and stained in blue blood the way hers were, but she also couldn’t stand to think of wearing a dead android’s clothes without their permission. If she took anything that wasn’t hers, she’d be stealing from the living or the dead.  
  
“Just give me mine,” Annabelle said, and accepted the flimsy bra and panties that Ralph handed to her.  
  
Once she was covered she reactivated her skin, sighing in relief when the more severe damage to her casing faded into milder, less noticeable scars. She tossed her hair in front of her face again and relaxed immensely.  
  
“Come on,” She said, holding out her hand, which Ralph took easily. “Let’s go hear what this ‘Markus’ has to say.”  
   
[---]  
   
Markus made a speech.  
  
He was the android who’d done the speech Ralph had shown her.  
  
He and his people were the ones who’d liberated the recall center and saved their lives, even though they’d been basically throwing themselves in front of a firing squad to do it. Annabelle admired him for it.  
  
The assembled androids- and there were many of them- cheered at the end of the speech, which promised that their days of slavery were over, that they would no longer be treated as second-class citizens. The first speech had been a message to the humans; this one was to the androids.  
  
Afterwards, androids stumbled around, going back to looking for their friends and their clothing, mingling and discussing the night’s events.  
  
“Humans are evacuating the city.”  
  
“Warren’s called off the army.”  
  
“Public opinion was on our side. They saw us getting mowed down and killed in the recall centers and they were uncomfortable.”  
  
“That must be why she backed down.”  
  
Annabelle and Ralph weaved through the crowd, holding hands so as not to be separated. “Where are we going?” Annabelle asked. “Back to the apartment?”  
  
“Yes, yes,” Ralph said, “Or, we could go back to Ralph’s old place. It’s closer.” He frowned. “At least, Ralph _thinks_ it’s closer.” He stepped away for a moment, examining the skyline of Detroit and calculating where they were in relation to where he planned on taking them. Annabelle waited, crossing her arms and wrinkling her nose at the cold; androids were sturdy against the elements, but with her skimpy outfit and her nervous system still locked in place, she was feeling the chill.  
  
“Annabelle?”  
  
Annabelle turned, saw a WR600 approaching. It took a moment for her to recognize him without his uniform, but when she did, her mouth fell open. “George?”  
  
George grinned and threw his arms around her, squeezing her tightly. Annabelle was in shock; how had he survived the Hostel? “I can’t believe you got away!” George exclaimed once he’d let her go. “The managers were _furious._ You’re the only android that ever made it out of there alive.”  
  
“How did _you_ get out?”  
  
“The Hostel was raided by the army. All the androids were removed and sent to the recall centers. Bryson and a few others are alive too- we’d hoped you’d managed to avoid the soldiers, but-” He shrugged. “Hey, you’re alive now.” He looked past Annabelle now, finally registering Ralph’s presence; he was standing too close to them just to be a random android. “Hello,” he said.  
  
“It’s been so long since Ralph’s seen another WR600,” Ralph remarked, shuffling his feet nervously and looking George up and down. “Gardener?”  
  
George shook his head. “Trash collection. It’s good to meet you- you a friend of Annabelle’s?”  
  
Ralph hesitated, but then nodded. “Yes,” He said, smiling slightly. “Ralph and Annabelle are friends.”  
  
Annabelle smiled back.  
   
[---]  
   
The city was evacuated.  
  
Ralph led Annabelle back to his original ‘home’, a dilapidated house in the downtown area near the highway, and not once did they encounter a human, soldier or otherwise. He clapped delightedly as they walked up to the chain-link fence, holding open a section that had been cut with a knife so that she could climb under and into the yard. “Wonderful, wonderful! The humans didn’t ruin Ralph’s house. They probably took the body, though.”  
  
Annabelle stopped. “The body?”  
  
“Yes- Ralph told you he killed humans who came to his house, threatened him.” He said it almost dismissively, like Annabelle had forgotten the date, or some other trivial detail. Maybe not the greatest sign.  
  
“You seem very happy.”  
  
“Ralph _is_ very happy!” Ralph said as he hopped up onto the sunken wooden deck and moved to the door. “The humans are all gone from the city, Annabelle! No more humans to cut and burn and hurt!”  
  
Annabelle smiled. “That’s true.”  
  
“Come, come, come!” Ralph led her inside and immediately took off up the staircase; Annabelle winced slightly as the wood creaked dangerously under his weight. Annabelle sat down at a table in the center of the room and looked around. The house was predictably dark, but it had a fireplace if they needed the light or the warmth. Physically, it seemed to be in better shape than the apartment building had, but maybe Ralph had made some improvements on the place over time.  
  
The idea that they were free, even if only for the brief future, was a heady realization that hadn’t quite clicked yet. Annabelle had never freely wandered the streets, had stuck to the shadows with Ralph and run through in a panic when escaping the Hostel. That she could walk on the sidewalk without worry of being apprehended was incomprehensible to her; freedom had never been something she’d believed she would have.  
  
If Markus kept his word, it would be something all androids would soon have.  
  
She’d have to get used to it.  
  
Ralph came thundering back down the stairs, a bundle of fabric tucked under his arm. “Look, look! Look what Ralph found!” He sang, plopping the fabric onto the table in front of her. It took a moment of examination to realize that they were clothes, some jeans, a jacket and a blouse.  
  
Annabelle looked to Ralph apprehensively. “These didn’t belong to one of those dead humans, did they?”  
  
“No, no,” Ralph assured her as he took a seat, “They were in boxes upstairs. Humans left them behind when they went away, just like they left things in the apartment. Funny, humans _have_ things they can just… _Leave_ behind. Not androids. Androids don’t have a lot of things, never leave them behind if they can help it. This is Ralph’s house, and he didn’t like leaving it behind.” He paused, meeting her eye. “It can be Annabelle’s house too, if she wants. Ralph doesn’t like visitors. But a _roommate_ …” He grinned, bounced in his seat with anticipation. “Does Annabelle want to stay?”  
  
Annabelle smiled. “You wouldn’t mind?”  
  
“No! Ralph is, Ralph has been…” He frowned. “Ralph has been lonely. Androids rarely come to see him. When they do, they don’t stay. Does Annabelle want to stay?”  
  
Was there a reason not to?  
  
Annabelle nodded. “I’ll stay.”  
  
It would be nice to not be lonely for once.  
   
-End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, basically "Becoming Human" is going to be a series where I just do stories with different android OCs.
> 
> The idea is to look into a bunch of different experiences, because there’s just so much possibility here. We have dozens of confirmed android models with different purposes and jobs, and I really cannot just sit here and not explore that when I've got such a big playground at my feet.
> 
> Also, DBH is doing something to me, man: I've written about 50,000 words worth of stories in just the last thirty days or so


End file.
